Post Love

I left my wife three years ago.
I write about the women that fill up the void.

Post Love Fifty One

It was really pouring that morning. She ran into the bus stop where I was hiding from the downpour, stood there for a moment hiding her panting, and in need of relaxation pulled out a cigarette from her bag. She glanced at me, hesitated, and stepped back into the rain to smoke under a small black umbrella. She was all in black. Black tights, black jacket, black curly hair. She wasn’t my type of girl, but she was attractive regardless. I’d caught her glancing at me, I’d caught her cleavage as she bent down, and now I looked at her ass as she faced away from the stop. A moment later she turned inside again and started to mouth do you mind if I just… as she motioned towards the bag she’d left on the bench. I cut her off. You don’t have to smoke in the rain. I don’t mind. 

The connection was made. The ice was broken. For someone as terrified of strangers as I, the kind of person that never speaks the first word, and when he does, fails miserably at getting across the thoughts in his head, I was already further along than I’d been in months. Feeling suddenly confident, I struck up conversation. I think I asked her if she was going to work. She wasn’t. She worked downtown. Waitress at a diner. I knew of it, but I’d never been inside. She was a simple girl, an easy-going girl, and that put me at ease. She talked about smoking, then about smoking weed, and I thought to myself, I could spend some time with this girl.

The pauses in between the conversation, the ones where I thought of new things to say, those were the ones I should have used to get her number. I didn’t because I was stalling. I was stalling because I was afraid. I was not prepared this early in the morning, still groggy and heavy headed, to be talking to a girl of interest. I was building up the courage, or hoping to, and checking the time to make sure I would ask her only shortly before my departure, because deep inside my mind underneath conscious thought, she had already said no, I was already figuring out ways to deal with the denial. I was planning ahead to side-step the pain that was on its way.

My bus showed up early. My plan failed. Life happened. Well, there’s my bus I said as I started to turn towards the street. I could see dissappointment in her expression. The bus doors opened. Hey, what’s your name? I asked. Laura. The busdriver yelled out at me. There was no time for phone numbers. I said bye as I got on, elevated by the moment, by my courage to ask for her name, by not having cared about making the bus wait a second to do so… even if I hadn’t gotten anywhere at all.

I thought about Laura the entire day. Her eyes and her smile, the comfort I felt around her almost immediately, the way she had initiated everything, there was no doubt about it. I wanted Laura. My blood full of hope, fueled by the thought that a pretty girl had liked me so much she’d done all the work, all in the spur of a moment, I knew that for once I had to make an effort, I had to chase the things I wanted, I had to go get her. And so, old notions of romance blurred in with a new desperation. How to get her. What could I do? I knew her name, I knew where she worked, I knew that she looked let down when I left her without exchanging numbers. My mind raced until it remembered that her work was close to my friend’s place, and a visit wasn’t out of place. Maybe I could stop by the diner and say hello. It was risky, but the girl had put in all the work. Maybe her eyes would have the same glance of future if I showed up and asked her out, if I showed her that I was putting in work too, that I remembered where she worked, remembered the things she had told me, liked her enough to go find her. 

I knew that though once upon a time those kinds of things would’ve been considered romantic, a culture of terrified minds connected only through the awkward moments created by their disconnectedness would be put off by such actions, would be afraid of so much direct human contact, so much attention, so much forward interest. These are the thoughts that started to rise up from the pit of my self-doubt with each step towards the diner, shaking loose another bubble of selfconscious thought, analyzing what I was doing as I walked to my friend’s place for no real reason but to peek through diner windows to see if Laura was there, a complete stranger, and I thought of myself working up the courage to go inside, I tried to picture what would happen if I did, I tried to gauge how it would go over, I kept turning around inside my mind and with that uneasiness in my soul I walked right past the diner and onwards to defeat, to never trying, and then past that as well, then towards a sense of saving yourself from embarassment, to a sense of knowing better, a strange pride in containing your urges.

My mind and its thought patterns seem to detach themselves from reality when I’ve been alone for too long. When I’ve spent hours in the office or in bed, sinking in the netherworld of my own consciousness, I think up things I could do when I surface in the real world again. I fantasize of a life where I’m not a coward, where I do the things I want to. Where I succeed. And without fail, each time I do venture back into the world, my fears set in again, my coward heart pumps them back into my veins, beating in my chest they remind me to abandon the decisions made in isolated dreamlands, they tell me it will never be real. But sometimes, when these hopes and dreams are not sprung from a lonely desperation inside myself, when instead they are firmly rooted in the real waking world, there is a narrow pathway linking my dreamlands to my reality, allowing some of my confidence to escape into my life, boosting me into situations I would usually steer away from. Though there is never enough fuel to push me through, never enough untainted blood to let me live the whole story as it played out in my head. Instead I am pushed blindly into the abyss and then left alone and empty, terrified and sweating, I was holding the receiver to my ear, my face burning up, why had I done this? I had to do something. I couldn’t let it go. I had looked up the number to the diner, asked for Laura, and she had just mouthed a timid and confused hello. 

Hi… sorry to be calling you at work… 

What was I doing? I started the whole thing off with an awkward pause followed by an apology. This was going nowhere.

I met you at the bus stop the other day.

She didn’t remember. She sounded horrified. I had to paint the picture for her. Raining, smoking, talking. Then she remembered.

I never got a chance to ask for your number.

Oh…

I thought we could go for drinks.

Well, why don’t you give me your number?

I should have hung up on her. I should have hung up and hung myself up too, and save myself from what the rest of my life is sure to play out as, a pathetic display of failure, the miserable proof of the fact that people don’t change, nothing changes, you spend half of your life learning nothing, understanding nothing, bettering yourself not one bit, not an ounce, for fifteen years you remain the same stupid crying teenager rejected by some other stupid teenager before summer break, you never get over it, you never heal… But I didn’t hang up. Knowing damn well there was no reason in doing it, I gave her the number. I read her the whole fucking thing. I don’t remember what was said after that. I didn’t matter. My mind was gone, sinking fast into disgust, into blackout hatred, I hung up the phone and tried not to think about it. I was at work and I went back to work, and I worked until it was time to go home, I got back on the bus and hoped that I wouldn’t see her, that she would never show her face again, I could have come to prayer if I needed to, I could have prayed to a God I know doesn’t exist… instead I numbed myself all the way home and then I got high, I got high like Laura might have been getting high, and I thought that it could have been a good time between us, had I not been who I am.

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